Seed Grants Team Up Community Organizations and Duke Researchers to Study Durham Housing Concerns

In May, the Durham City Council voted to provide $4.5 million to develop and preserve several hundred units of affordable housing, the most recent step in a series of initiatives that the city, county and community health sectors have taken to address challenges in Durham and the Triangle as growth and development in the region drive housing prices up.

The Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University and the Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship (DCCES) have awarded three 12-month grants for community-engaged research on housing and economic well-being in Durham and the surrounding region. These grants team up Duke University researchers with community organizations to investigate housing concerns ranging from understanding how wealth is distributed across the city to addressing homelessness in the LGBTQ+ population.

“This partnership allows the Cook Center and the Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship to leverage our unique strengths to contribute meaningfully to conversations about housing taking place in our community,” said Tyson Brown, director of the Cook Center. “These grants were intentionally designed to align with local priorities, and each of the researcher-community teams that were awarded seed grant funds are committed to creating an equitable and sustainable collaboration.”

“We’re seeking to promote relevant, impactful research by merging the expertise of community members and academics,” said Mina Silberberg, DCCES faculty director. “The community is very adept at identifying the most important issues that are facing them and really understanding the granular details of those issues. However, community organizations often don’t have the research capacity that Duke can offer as a full-time academic entity. Together, we can be successful at designing research studies and thinking about how to translate research findings into impact.”

Activating Faith-Owned Land for Affordable Housing in Durham

David Berger, professor of Economics at Duke and Eli Smith, director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, will explore underutilized land in Durham belonging to faith-based institutions. Through engagement with local congregations, Berger and Smith will identify pilot sites where there is the potential to develop affordable housing. 

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“This grant will allow us to expand our efforts in Durham and the Triangle to help congregations transform underutilized assets into desperately needed housing,” said Smith. “The faith-based housing movement has already proven a powerful opportunity for building affordable housing nationwide, and partnerships like this one with Duke will be crucial in building a sustainable, data-driven faith-based housing movement across the Triangle.”

For Berger, this partnership is an application of his broader research on housing supply and the barriers to creating more workforce housing. “One promising approach is to use existing land more intensively, and this grant will allow us to explore whether underused land owned by churches and other community institutions could help create new housing opportunities,” he said. “The project will also examine how Durham’s recent zoning reforms, which allow greater flexibility in how land can be used, may make these kinds of developments more feasible.”

Housing the Most Vulnerable: A Community-Academic Partnership

Tonia Poteat, professor in the School of Nursing, and Kathryn (Kate) Whetten, professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, are teaming up with Vanity Deterville of the LGBTQ Center of Durham to identify emergency and long-term strategies to address housing concerns faced by members of the LGBTQ community who are experiencing homelessness. 

“We’re excited to draw on our public health and public policy expertise in equitable partnership with the LGBTQ Center of Durham to address the disproportionate impact of the Durham housing crisis on LGBTQ people in the city,” said Poteat.

Members of the LGBTQ community who are experiencing homelessness are a uniquely vulnerable population who may not feel welcome in emergency housing provided by some faith-based charitable organizations, leaving them with scant options for shelter. Duke students will work with the team to explore successful existing models of LGBTQ community care in Greensboro, NC and other cities in the South, collecting and analyzing data that can lead to better interventions in Durham.

Mapping the Wealth Gap: A Community-Engaged Study of Racial Disparities in Housing and Economic Well-Being in Durham

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Christina Gibson-Davis, professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, Steven Day, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at North Carolina Central University, and Henry McKoy, president and CEO of Carolina Community Impact, will work with the City of Durham's Office of Community Partnerships & Engagement to develop and conduct a survey that captures wealth composition, housing assets and debt, and economic well-being across racial, ethnic and income groups in the city. 

“A project like this is long overdue,” observed McKoy.

Gibson-Davis stressed the importance of research that leads to real-world impact. “With this grant, our team will generate data on racial wealth and housing disparities in Durham, giving policymakers and residents a real evidence base for closing these gaps, not just describing them.”

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“This is what it looks like when institutions move beyond studying communities from the outside and begin working alongside them,” said Day. “North Carolina Central University, one of the nation's leading HBCUs, together with Duke University and the City of Durham, are sitting at the same table asking the same question: Who has wealth in this city, who doesn't, and why? Durham is home to the legacy of Black Wall Street — a city with a history of Black communities building extraordinary wealth and a history of policies that contributed to economic disparities. This project gives us the opportunity to generate the data needed to better understand both sides of that story and, through true community partnership, help inform solutions that create a more equitable future.”

Moving forward together

These research grants mark the beginning of a long-term relationship between the newly-formed Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship, an interdisciplinary hub created to facilitate collaborative scholarship between community partners and Duke faculty, staff and students, and the Cook Center, whose mission is to advance rigorous research, transformative education and public engagement aimed at understanding and addressing the systems that produce and sustain inequity.

The grant initiative aligns with key focus areas for both Duke centers. Neighborhoods, Housing and Infrastructure is one of five key focus areas identified by Duke Community Affairs together with the community in Duke’s Strategic Community Impact Plan, making it a priority area for DCCES. Educational and Economic Opportunity is a core research pillar of the Cook Center.

“Tyson reached out to us and said that they were looking at funding research around housing,” said Debbie Goldstein, associate vice provost for Community Engaged Scholarship. “He’d heard that we were as well, so he was really interested in working together. We had a shared interest in housing research and in being more engaged locally in Durham, and those two things came together in this grant initiative.”

Goldstein looks forward to future collaborations between DCCES and the Cook Center. “I definitely think we'll partner with the Cook Center on developing courses and research projects,” she said. “This was a first way for us to work together on supporting community engaged research and hopefully it will lead to other things.”

Heading photo: Durham skyline (Bill Snead, Duke Marketing and Communications)